Thursday, January 2, 2014

settling in, at last!

And the day Boo's step brother is supposed to return from his holiday visit with his mom, he returns to school on the 6th.

We have been struggling to find our home school magic for awhile now, trying out lots of different schedules. It seems we would settle in and something outside our control would impact our plans enough that we would have to change things around again. It got old and frustrating for both of us. So we have done a lot of talking about what our little home school needs to be going forward. We have also done a lot of cleaning and reorganizing. Cleaning helps us think and take inventor of what we have.

Life is certainly funny. I had said I was having a hard time keeping up with what Boo wants/needs. We had a few talks about it:

what wasn't working and what was

evaluated the addition of a brother to the household

and the attack of the killer gymnastics schedule

overhauled the house/school

4 years of homeschooling behind us...

She wants to go back to the way it started. Back to the way things were organized in Kindergarten/First Grade!~Oh my gosh so do I!!!!!

(scary movie Boo making pizza)

Boo misses the solid 4 core a day structured time slots (based on Classical Education) with active 15 min. transition games (pass, catch,hop scotch, jump rope, etc.) between subjects. She misses the unit studies I created that encompassed every subject, a field trip, an art project, and a theme dinner at the end. She misses what I consider the Mister Roger's Neighborhood experiences, the daily errands to the post office, the library, the market, copy store, parks, playgrounds, craft/fabric stores, pool, etc... all the activities we used to cram in after school work but before dinner. Of course all of that loveliness was before gymnastics ate our whole afternoons, evenings, and often our weekends. Also I was working during that period of time as the Director of a small cooperative preschool and part of my job was to run errands for the school and teachers. On my own I am more a homebody than an adventurer. That is not to say it isn't possible to go FORWARD to BACK, it is and we will! Or to say we aren't already doing some of it, we are. BUT we can do more. We can do better.

I think for the first time in a long time I am looking forward to the work involved in what she is asking because I know it is a system of learning she makes progress in but it also offers lots of time learning naturally. Almost a perfect balance. Why did we ever leave it? Well, at the time she outgrew. And now she has grown back into it. So once again we make a transition in our learning style to meet the needs of one student and one teacher. It reminds us how lucky we are to be learning at home with the freedom to search for what fits us and not being forced to fit a system.

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About Me

I am the mom of 4 kids. That is a lot of kids! Homeschooling the youngest, Beach, our little ninja. She is a competitive gymnast with tons of personality & a unique perspective on life. She makes her own way through the world with a visual disability. We live, farm, & school on a small urban farmstead west of the beautiful city of SLC.